Postman Variables

I’m a huge fan of Postman and have been using it for some time now. They have added some great features but now has so many features that if you don’t use it regularly, it can sometimes take a while to find what you’re looking for.

I was recently trying to call a Rest api that needed authentication, nothing unusual here. Clearly putting credentials directly in to the system is a bit of a no-no these days, if you try, Postman will spot it and suggest you use variables instead, which is a nice touch. The issue for me was that I couldn’t remember how to create variables and the help referred to an icon that I couldn’t find.

Fortunately, and this is why I am a fan of Postman, there are other ways to achieve this. The first way is to actually type the value in, then highlight it and right click. You get the option to set a variable.

The other way I found to do this is rather than entering a value, enter a variable name surrounded by double curly brackets, Postman will recognise that the variable has no value and allow you to set it.

You can set variables at a variety of levels global, collection etc. and then use them as desired.